Recently, persons with developmental disorder are said to be on the rise. It has been found that detecting symptoms and starting medical treatment in an early stage can alleviate symptoms of the developmental disorder and enhance effects to adapt to the society. In Japan, efforts are encouraged to find the developmental disorder at an early stage by an interview at the time of medical checkup for half-past-one-year-old children, or the like. However, the effect is not enough because there are problems such as shortage of psychiatrists and an increased length of time for the interview. To cope with this, there is a demand for an objective and efficient diagnosis assistance apparatus for the developmental disorder.
To find the developmental disorder at an early stage, for example, it is ideal that the diagnosis is possible at the time of medical checkup for half-past-one-year-old children. Also, care need to be paid when the apparatus is used at the medical checkup. A typical behavior of the developmental disorder children is to avoid looking at eyes of a person facing them (turn their eyes away). It is also known as a typical behavior of developmental disorder children that they favor a video of a geometric pattern rather than a video of a person. There is a technique for detecting a gaze point by imaging a face of a person by a camera and calculating positions of a corneal reflection and a pupil, and thus, methods for assisting the diagnosis of developmental disorder by applying this technique, or the like, are proposed.
As described above, even with known techniques for detecting a gaze point and techniques for assisting diagnosis of a subject with developmental disorder, there are further demands for a method for detecting with higher accuracy.
In view of the above, it is an object of the present invention to provide a detection apparatus and a detection method capable of achieving improved detection accuracy.
In one aspect, there is provided a detection apparatus comprising: a display; an imaging unit configured to image a subject; an eye gaze detector configured to detect an eye daze direction of the subject based on a captured image captured by the imaging unit; an output controller configured to display a diagnostic image that includes a person image and a geometric pattern image, onto the display; and a gaze point detector configured to detect a first gaze point as a gaze point of the subject in the person image based on the eye gaze direction, and configured to detect a second gaze point as a gaze point of the subject in a region that includes at least one of a center of a geometric pattern, a characteristic portion of the geometric pattern, a portion in which density of lines forming the geometric pattern is higher than other portions, and a portion in which the geometric pattern changes, in the geometric pattern image.
A detection apparatus and a detection method according to the present invention can effectively improve detection accuracy.